Yup - the flying siege unit that deals twenty burstdamage for each "Broodling" that is being thrown towards each and everything your opponents obtains plus the provoked splash damage and movement disability.
Yup - the backbone of every single zergs lategame if they are not wanting to lose games on purpose.
Yup - the only unit enabling zerg to stand toe to toe with mech and protoss deathballs.
Yup - that unit that totally destroys the game.
What what what? Broodlords destroying the game? Coming from a Zergs perspective?
Sadly, Yup (
but that's not the only thing being f*ed up)
...
 |
| (yaay - so much viarity) |
Ever since the
Patch increasing the range of the
Queens attack got released
Zergs realized that they are actually equiped with a fairly (
cough) strong
lategame because the patch made it actually reachable for the majority of us. So the
general plan is it to wait out our opponents and survive their relentless attacks because it
does not really matter how you reach the deadly combination it's just important to reach it.
Even if you lost a leg and an arm (
refering to bases and tech structures) while trying to escape the whiteshark from the movie "
Yaws" as long as you are able to crawl yourself onto the island of endless happyness you are fine, oh yeah, really fine. This is
HOW fine you are
in terms of money (
sortof,
slivko,
PiG,
johnnyrecco,
LoweLy).
Anyone ever heard anything about those guys before the malicious patch appeared? I guess not. These are so called "
Patch Zergs". A "
Patch Zerg" is someone who suddenly -
out of no where -
got an increase of skill since the patch came out and
actually started to win alot of money.
Undeserved money.
Don't get me wrong these guys are still alot better than I am in most regards yet this is pathetic and it is
ruining the competition, my
motivation and -
most importantly - the general understanding of "
Skill".
What I mean by that?
Well, there
once was a time where you had to
severly outplay your opponent in alot of ways to win a game. Two parties were facing each others and th
e one with the greater multitasking,
decisionmaking,
micro,
mapawareness and
skill would
win. Players like
DRG or
NesTea were
lightyears ahead of everyone else in this term and made a huge name for themselves. Now with the patch
Zerg basically starts with 100 creeptumors by default. It's
not a big deal to spread creep anymore, and there is
almost no difference between a GSL creepspread and the creepspread of a european Grandmaster. This has been
taking away an entire skillset that yet had to be discovered.
Zerg was told to be the race with the
highest skillcap with
relentless injection timings, hard to spread
creep and a
squishy army that needed to be used in a
certain way in order to succeed. If you are not capable of keeping your
Muta, Ling, Bling army busy you are basically out of the game. It was more cut throat. There is
almost no ultra amazing micro that is being utilized in proffessional Starcraft anymore like there was in the beginning of it. Here is an example (
Super 15 micro of "old times")
You could argue that the
metagame wasn't developed to the state it is in as of today, and sure, it's true. The
meta game was SHIT but this switch of metagame has not been done by the players themselves, it's intended by Blizzard.
They want the game to be macro dependent and sure, it's a
good thing but there
are literally no possibilities to punish anything anymore and if you do so it's mostly luck based.
 |
| (easily defended timing) |
An example for this is a
banelingbust against Protoss. It
works as long as your opponent either tries to do a Zealot two Stalker harras on your third or he fails with his Sentries pulling them back to kill the so called "
Retardmagnet" (
Overlord bating Sentries into the Protoss base) so you are
basing your allin on a percentage that has a fairly low chance of winning you the game. This leaves us with no particular timings to prevent any greed in Starcraft2. Neither for Protoss nor for Terran.
What does this lead us to?
An anticlimactic game in not only
ZvT and
ZvP but also in
TvP and
PvP. In the opening minutes of the game alot of micro is being thrown out.
Protoss puts up
Forcefields,
Blinkmicros back his
Stalkers, does alot of
target firing -
Terran splits Marines,
Stuttersteps,
Drops alot,
focusfire with Tanks -
Zerg Micros Zerglings,
Runbys,
Surrounds,
Flanks,
dualpronged Harras -
all in all the early to mid game is actionpacked and enjoyable to play and watch. As soon as you reach the lategamestage though the rate of micro requiered drops down
RAPIDLY and it evolves into a boring game where
both parties sit on their precious armies and harras from time to time.
Protoss warping in Zealots is called "
Multitasking" by casters which is a
testament to the lategames boringness itself. -
Wow, that dude warps in sh*t here and does nothing else in the maintime woooow -
 |
| (click to enlarge) |
This waiting lasts for about as long
as someone decides to not spend 50 minutes in a game and attacks. He
either crushes his opponent in no time by stealing the Mothership or getting a favorable engagement with Infested Terrans aswell as Neural
or is getting crushed in no time by engaging badly. This is not how it's supposed to be in a professional eSport game.
Let's just take a look at Dota2.
I already wrote about how much better the UI is and how much more inviting the game is in terms of the Leveling system - that gives you goodies and skins - at the same time is not a necessity still giving you a drive to play more and more. This is not part of the arguement I just wanted to give a little sidenote. What I am trying to do show with the comparison to Dota2 is to compare the fights in Dota2 work. In
Dota2 you see skirmishes that sometimes last for 5 minutes (
GD B-Team vs Na'vi G1 Fight Starladder). There is
no Oneshotting,
Fungals or
Vortexing that instantly wins an engagement. Fights are
drawn out and almost all the time this attribute
carries on into the lategame.
 |
| (Dota2 fight) |
Another totally different fact about Dota2 is the fact that the
earlygame has a significant impact on the Lategame. If you start off in Dota with your Carry picking up easy Kills the advantage carries on into the engagements later in the game.
The early game MATTERS.
This
does not apply to the lategame of Starcraft 2. It's like you are playing a
DIFFERENT game
as soon as you reach the lategame.
You opened up with a 6 Pool and you microed like a boss? Being ahead through out entire mid game?
Well. A Vortex can change
EVERYTHING.
It's not like it shouldn't be possible to turn around fights. You can
turn around games in Dota2 too but
you'll be needing to pull off some incredibly skilled moves and
therefore outplaying the opponents team by alot not just by hitting a lucky ass Vortex or failing to Spread your Broodlords to prevent Seeker Missiles to hit you.
An example for this is "The Play" made by Natus Vincere destroying invictus Gaming in TI2 ("The Play"). You can SEE how the crowd is going INSANE because they know that 99% of the worlds team would've straight out died against a gank like this but Na'vi did not. They hit all of their abilities correct with the Rubick stealing Ravage and the perfect Blackhole by the Enigma. It's just a delight to see.
Let's just
compare this to a Starcraf2 Lategame with
NO EXCITEMENT whatsoever because
everyone can use Fungals and
Spread or use
Vortex there is not even a potential depth in the Lategame.
The lack of micro being requiered in lategame almost denies any possibility to do literally "outplay" your opponents. No matter from what angle you look uppon the Lategame - it's being unfair.
Broodlords - Unfair,
Vortex - Unfair,
Thor Splash and Seekermissile - Unfair and all of them are
not fun to use nor to watch on stream.
So what has to happen to improve the game?
 |
| (thanks inviszerg on reddit for the graph) |
Starcraft II developers will be having to aim to a steady or maybe even
EXPONENTIAL GRAPH!
Once again I'll be needing the comparison to Dota.
Early fights consist of throwing some stuns and maybe use the right mouse button to autoattack but the
later the game goes the more
Items you get and the more Abilities you and your opponents get so you need to think quicker and also react quicker. Use a "
Forcestaff"
(an Item that pushes a targeted hero in the direction in that it's looking)
to push a targeted
hero out of the dangerzone,
disable the heavy hitter
with a "
Sheepstick",
heal your team
with a "
Mekanism" in an
AOE-radius aswell as giving out mana with "
Arcane Boots". I could even further
elaborate on that but it already shows the diversity for Dota and Starcraft because it's pretty much exactly the other way around.
How are we going to achieve this type of change in terms of microusage?
I am not entirely sure about how far the units are allowed to be deviated because
Wings of Liberty is already pretty much figured out and that will probably be
up to Heart of the Swarm to fix it. I have the opinion that
there should not be alot of new 1 - A units being thrown into the pool of Starcraft Units. They should
rather put in more Spellcasters. Another possibility would be to increase the Supplycount of the Broodlords at the same time making them faster(
movement speed) or give them any other possibility so you can actually
USE them instead of just
MAKE them and
AMOVE them. Same goes for the Protoss Deathball which is not
USED it's just
MADE and
A-Clicked. These are fundamentals that are having to be adressed in
HOTS and Blizzard announced that they are trying to restructure Protoss in order to use more Gateway Units and
Zerg still is kinda messed up with now having two micro denial Units. Terran, well, nothing changed (yet).
So what do I end this post with?
I am just hoping that Blizzard is taking some of the recent criticism by heart in order to fix the problems with the game at the moment. The gameplay itself has not been that criticised but I wanted to elaborate on that because
it is making me mad to play a boring lategame because it
forces me to end the games in the midstages. Even
watching Tournaments is boring as f*ck for reasons like Broodlords, Infestors playing against Mothership, Archon is not intense nor it is that skill dependend. It
does not really matter if DRG or JulyZerg or even Nerchio controlls those Broodlords because there is no Nextlevel Micro or Unitcontrol that really seperates the Pros from the Bonjwas like Mutamicro in BW did.
In the end I am
just a guy that loves Starcraft II alot and
seeing this decay of the game just makes me sad. I just
want a nice actionpacked, skillbased game to watch, play, enjoy and live the game the way I did the time Muta Ling Bling vs Terran and Hydra Roach were viable.
Seeing these facts together with a Battle.net that actually acts like a social network (
close to what steam does)
would make me a really happy nerd.
