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Blizzard , being the hard-working team they are, have released not only 1 but 2 beta patches in less than 48 hours. This came as a surprise to most players as they sat waiting with growing impatience for the servers to come back online. Speculations running rampant, many players took the time to guess what future changes may entail. 48 hours and 2 patches later, this is outcome. Discuss it here.

• Viking

•The damage done by this unit in Fighter Mode has changed from 6 (+8 armored) to 10 (+4 armored).

• Reaper

•The delay between attacks for D-8 Charges has decreased from 2.5 to 1.8

• Orbital Command

• Observer: Gravitic Boosters: The cost of this research has decreased from 150 minerals and 150
vespene gas to 100 minerals and 100 vespene gas.

• High Templar

•New ability: Feedback – Drains all energy from the target unit and causes damage equal to the amount of energy drained.

• Colossus: The building pathing radius for this unit has decreased from .75 to .5625

• Mothership

•Vortex: The energy cost of this ability has increased from 75 to 100.
•Vortex: The target radius of this ability has decreased from 3.0 to 2.5.
•Temporal Rift: This ability has been removed from the game.
•Wormhole Transit: This ability has been removed from the game.
•New ability: Mass Recall – Teleports all of the player’s units in the target area to the Mothership.

• Nexus

•Chrono Boost can no longer target allies.

• Gateway

•The build time of this building has increased from 50 to 65.

• Infestor

•Fungal Growth: The damage done by this ability has decreased from 48 to 36.

•Fungal Growth: This ability now prevents affected units from burrowing.

•Neural Parasite: Functionality changed – The Infestor now channels this spell, which lasts 10 seconds or until the Infestor is destroyed. You can now target      all units with this ability.

•Terran Infestation: The ability’s energy cost has reduced from 50 to 25 and Infested Terrans now spawn 1 at a time.

BUG FIXES

•Addressed an issue causing people to receive an “Internal Battle.net Error” message with their game client.

•Muting your microphone will no longer cause your microphone to be turned off in the operating system once the program has exited.

•Please note that the voice chat functionality has only partially been implemented. There are many known issues with voice chat that we expect to address in a future patch.

•The “Medium” graphical settings were reconfigured to work better on appropriate machines. The video settings “auto-detect” functionality has been reset as a result.

•Added a frame rate limiter to the game menus to prevent some graphics cards from running at higher frame rates than necessary.

• Banshee

•Cloak: This ability no longer requires Fusion Core to research.

• Barracks

•The build time for this building has decreased from 65 to 60.

• Factory

•The build time for this building has decreased from 65 to 60.

• Reactor

•The build time for this building has decreased from 40 to 25.

• Reaper

•Nitro Boost: The build time for this upgrade has increased from 90 to 100.

• Starport

•The build time for this building has decreased from 55 to 50.

• Tech Lab

•The build time for this building has decreased from 30 to 25.

• Mothership

•The food cost of this unit has increased from 6 to 8.•The number of shots fired by this unit has decreased from 8 to 6.•The shield of this unit has decreased from 400 to 350.•The health of this unit has decreased from 400 to 350.

•The acceleration of this unit has decreased from 1.3125 to 0.3125.

•The deceleration of this unit has increased from 0 to 1.

• Nexus

•Chrono Boost: The duration of this ability has decreased from 30 to 20.

• Corruptor

•The damage done by this unit has increased from 12 (+8 massive) to 12 (+10 massive).

After spending a considerable amount of time reading and contemplating the new changes I am left thinking blizzard is on the right track. Looking at the patchnotes, you can see that blizzard is actually taking the time to sift through community sites, and read the feedback given. Which is without a doubt the key to a booming future in esports.

Protoss has certainly been hit hardest by this wave of balance changes, especially their current lateame crutch…the mothership. In my opinion , blizzard did the right thing by nerfing the mothership the way they did. Basically they turned it from a game ending single unit, to something way more similar to an arbiter from the previous game. Players, especially those opting for terran have been getting slaughtered left and right due to this 1 unit messiah, and having this patch come into play has given new rise to terran players everywhere. I agree that the changes are very large, and only time will tell if they were the right ones.

Another big nerf is the Chronoboost ability. This combined with increasing the time it takes to build a gatway has altered the protoss early game quite a bit. Many feel that the current 1 gate cybercore tech build is no longer feasable, especially PvT (terran reactor and barracks build times have been reduced). However, I still feel that mid game protoss combos (zealot/stalker/immortal/sentry) is close to unbeatable, especially for zerg players. This was confirmed by current #1 rank player in US platinum division 1, Smuft. He states that there is certainly a timing window where the above protoss unit combo is untouchable. It will be interesting to see if this combo is still timed properly, or if the delay in buildings and chronoboost will render this obsolete.

With all of these nerfs it becomes unclear as to the future of the race. However, 1 thing I do know is that you could sail a boat in the tears of protoss players everywhere.

Terran on the other hand received the opposite end of the stick, and were buffed quite a bit. This is in part due to the small terran player pool competing at the upper ranks. Terrans were having trouble with roach rushes (although recently not soo much) as well as zealot/immortal combos. However with soo many of their building times being reduced it opens up alot more possibility for deviation. Cheesing is viable due to the reduced build time of the barracks, as well as the reactor. 3 barracks with 3 reactor addons is a strong early game rush against protoss, so long as its not scouted. Banshees become more useful as well now that cloaking is available at the tech lab. Reapers have been both nerfed and buffed at the same time. What this means is that, if you are in battle, and you are shooting once, then moving, then shooting , then moving etc, the reaper is alot weaker. It only does 30 damage as opposed to 50. However, their rate of attack is increased, which means if you are not move shooting, but rather standing still and shooting more than 1 volley, the reaper does more damage over time. It allows units that are chasing it to have a chance, but still allows it to destroy buildings etc really fast.

Zerg lies somewhere in between the other 2. They recieved both good and bad things. Many are complainging that roaches were not nerfed, or that mutas were not made easier to kill in PvZ. However, those at the top of the platinum division seem to agree that PvZ is easier for protoss. This doesn’t cator well to the masses, and there currently is a debate regarding balance in this matchup.

-Wow. That mothership nerf might actually be too much? And I play terran. I feel sorry for toss users tho, PvZ is already hard and now chrono boost gets nerfed after your gates got nerfed? Fun fun
-FrozenArbiter (Teamliquid MOD)

-Wow. Terran has such ridiculous rush power now I’m going to vomit
-Louder (currently #1 platinum division USserver)

-Good terran players are completely dominating zergs atm. This just made things worse
-lalush (top European platinum player)

-well pvt is massively protoss favored but nerfing chronoboost doesnt fix it and just makes pvz worse
-Idra (Current SC1 progamer on CJ entus)

-Overall I think the balance team did a good job on this patch, glad they do not pay a lot of attention to the people on the battle.net forums
-prayanavita (ex-war3 semi pro and current platinum leader)

Overall the reactions are very mixed. Some are happy, others are soo upset they plan on switching races. Personally I think if you are soo upset that you decide to switch your race, you are not in the beta for the right reasons. It is not provided for players to simply try their hardest to be the best on the ladder, it’s to balance the game, and provide proper feedback. If every protoss player got upset and decided to switch to terran, then they are not fixing the problem, merely running from it. I say to all you protoss bretheren out there, be strong and fight for your race. Who knows what next week has in store!

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-LucK from www.starcraft2.pro