New Mothership Info!

  In keeping with the democratic feelings of this month, Blizzard is continuing with their new polling ability on Battle.net. This time the focus is on the Protoss Mothership and some recent tweaks she has undergone. Be sure to check out the changes and voice your opinion!   This is what Cydra had to say about the Mothership:   If Zerg has the Queen and Terran has the Thor, Protoss has the Mothership!

Currently, Mothership has three abilities - Cloaking Field, Time Bomb and Vortex.

Cloaking Field passively cloaks the player's nearby ground units and structures.

Time Bomb creates a distortion field around the Mothership that lasts 30 seconds. Air units within this field cannot move and take no damage from ranged attacks. Time Bomb costs 100 energy and cooldown takes 90 seconds.

Vortex creates a gravity vortex for 30 seconds that incapacitates units that are sucked into it. units under the effect of the vortex cannot be hit with weapons. Vortex does not give any damage to units sucked into it. Vortex costs 150 energy and cooldown takes 3 seconds.   Source:  Battle.net

 

Vortex not dealing damage is kinda lame. I voted for "Like it but want some change on Vortex". I'm surprised that they didn't have an option about the Cloaking Field. They must really be pleased with it. Personally, I reckon it detracts from the enormity of the Protoss army. Basically, whenever you're being attacked by a Mothership, the Mothership's going to be the only thing that's not Cloaked, which doesn't seem to suit such a unit.

I'd think it'd be interesting to see it act almost like a pulse, potentially disrupting combat and micro. Plus it would add to the radiant and powerful feel of the Mothership.

Overall, the Mothership should be able to, A) Attack both Ground and Air targets, which it can, B) Be unique, which it is, isn't it? C) Have Time Bomb, which it does, D) Have either a combination of Black Hole and Vortex or a Planet Cracker-type ability, or perhaps even both, one for Air targets the other for Ground targets, kinda like having the Battlecruiser's Plasma Torpedoes and Missile Barrage, it only has Vortex in this regard, and E) Have a Recall-type ability.

They're the necessities in my own opinion. They're obviously happy with Cloaking Field though, and it's obviously working well for them, which is good to hear.

 

Congratulations Blizzard. The Mothership is now even more of a bad arbiter copy.

It cloaks, but it can't cloak air units.
Vortex does the same thing as stasis field, and Time bomb's immobilization of air and immunity to ranged attacks makes it into a nerf version of Vortex
Does the MS still act as a warp in point?

They might as well just bring back the arbiter since not only does it do the same thing, but it also does them better.

I think they should bring back the black hole and planet cracker as the MS was in the original demo. Also bring back the one unit build limit. Obviously the black hole needs to be scaled back but there was never a problem with the other abilities being overpowered; in fact the nerds made them pretty much worthless


On a side note this topic is very convenient as I was about to make an omnidiscussion on the MS Thor and Queen

 

Except fot the part where motherships kenot cloak air units, Blizz did a good job in balancing motherships. Actually I would like to add that motherships should not be restricted to 1 but they should be allowed to be spam just like other units.

Time bomb could be useful while vortex is very harmful against air units even though they do not provide any damage. Good job Blizzard!

Keep it up and dun forget to cloak air units as well as making them spammable...

 

They can make more now? That sucks. What's the point in a Mothership if there're more than one? They should just call it an Arbiter then, because, as you said, that's what it's become.

You still haven't done a final comment on the Zerg Omnidiscussion.

 

Couldn't agree more. I feel that Blizzard is going downhill since they made the Medivac. It is as though they're not pleased with their old ideas and just wanted to bring out all the worst ideas. Sometimes, the first ideas are the best, and Blizzard has to see that.

The passive cloaking field is, for the most part, fine. But it is only there for the nastalgic feeling of the arbiter. Yes, it can cloak structures, but by the time any motherships has been built, there would already be detectors scouring the air. Furthermore, anyone planning to do an assault that would in anyway penetrate a late-game base should be smart enough to bring some detectors. On the other hand, if you use the mothership to assault the enemy base, it is obvious that the enemy will pin on the mothership since it is like the queen on the chessboard, thus, limiting the usefulness of the cloaking field.

The Time Bomb... it isn't a time bomb anymore is it? At first, when I'm reading the comments, I thought the time bomb stops air units AND stops projectiles. Oops, my bad, I overestimated Blizzard's logic in thinking. They removed the ability for time bombs to stop projectiles? Seriously? What was wrong with the time bomb? Like, my brain's growing numb, and i'm turning into a hickie.. .I jus diont unherstaond. Whut is wrung withze Time Bwomb in the Fwirst Place? It was a perfect ability, that matches the protoss' niche. It can be easily balanced by allowing units move in and out of the time bomb to adjust their path of projectiles. The Time Bomb was the perfect assault spell, which is important in defeating late-game turtlers. Okay, so they removed it, but what blows my mind even MORE is that they made it so it just stops air units for 30 sec, and no ranged units can attack it. LOLWTF? First of all, are there any melee'ing air units? Second of all, I thought the Black Hole was removed for a reason, because it can just stop air units and basically kill it. The Time Bomb now does the same, because any smart protoss players who are about to use the Time Bomb would then kill off the air units stuck. Third of all, it is like Stasis Field, but worse, because it doesn't affect ground units. Fourth of all, which pisses me off the most, the ORIGINAL IDEA WAS BETTER!

The Vortex. Why? As mentioned, I thought the Black Hole was removed for a reason. It is like the second part of the old arbiter's stasis field, the ground units part. So, now I get it! Blizzard simply gave the arbiter a size and damage upgrade to make it more awesome and please the crowd, then made the arbiter's spells SH*T. Now we have to UPGRADE for the cloak, AND have 2 spells for 1 spell in the original (Which 1 of them have a crazy long cooldown time, but since you can have multiple motherships, and the time bomb itself is 30 seconds, it should be okay), and the Recall ability has been scrapped to make way for warp-in. Oh wait, you can't move air units now either. LOL? Deja Vu anyone? hmm...

I totally dislike this, and from the moment that blizzard allowed a player to have multiple Motherships, I knew the mothership will face drastic nerfing. Yet, blizzard's creativity is on an all time low with this unit. They ought go back to the original game, click the arbiter a few times, learn that sh*tty time travel lesson from the creepy molester in the arbiter, and look at what they did when they first showed us Starcraft II!!

 

Cloaking Field. I agree a weakened arbiter copy there. But it still it useful. If you throw in a few illusions and have them cloaked by the Mothership and use that as the decoy and when that's being attacked you bring you large main force to the other side of the base and attack. There's always good uses for this. But the mack of air cloak is just silly. Bad idea Blizzard.

Time Bomb. No ranged damage to air units. Um ok. What melee air damage is there? Maybe something like s scourge from SC 1. But that's it. So practically that's no damage at all. The use of the word "ranged" is pretty redundant. Gee this is really like that Arbiter ability where you encase the units in the crystals and they can't move or be attacked for a time period. But again the Mothership's version is a weakened version. I'd say onlt useful on something huge as a Battle Cruiser or another Mothership. So you can kill the other forces and leave the big bad air unit till the end. And apart from that kind of useless if it's one unit only. But if it affects a little area as the Arbiter's ability did. Then it'd be more useful. But easily countered by spreading out your air units.

Vortex. What. This looks to be the practically the same as the ability above. Only different graphics and it works on all units. Bad idea Blizzard.

So in essence we have a unit with a massive amount of HP and shields, and 3 pretty average abilities. 2 of which basically do the same thing. In their current form I'm voting no to them all. Poor choices and very uninspired. Personally I'd choose the SC 1 Arbiter over this. Even with it's less HP and shields.

 

In a attempt to make a short post on the subject (I might make a large one later to add to my ancient collection of them), I say drop vortex and give the Mothership Planet Cracker back and give some it some kind of Black Hole that only destroys a couple of units at its center (after a little bit of warning) but also severely slows downs the actions of nearby units. Finally get rid of the Cloaking field and have the Mothership generate a field that can be warped into. At the point in the game where a person is going to use the Mothership, cloak won't be helpful but a mobile command ship that can also do a respectable amount of damage in a last ditch scenario will be very helpful.

P.S. For those of you slamming TIme Bomb currently it sounds like it makes all air units arround the Mothership immune to damage as well as unable to move but it says nothing about attack so they might be able to attack ground units while in the field.

 

I agree that the passive cloaking field makes her the new arbiter. The other reason I don't like this new ability is that it makes her undoubtedly the very first target of a battle to avoid having to comsat or bring more detectors to the field as they get taken down - which would result in dancing back and forth which would not only look silly but would also make her attack and other abilities useless. The arbiter had an insanely weak attack because it was not meant to attack, only support. As I see and prefer the mothership she should unleash hell with her abilities and multiple attacks, not just support. So, +1 for 1 unit cap, +1 for planetcracker, +1 for the very first timebomb, and +1 for a passive psi field. It's not the number of manual abilities that make a unit cool.

 

Practically, ingame, way away from theorycraft etc, you play Protoss versus some other players.

How would you use that mothership?

Personnally I can hardly get the point of those abilities.

Cloaking aura? Fine, well, I put the mothership over some outpost, and I cloak it while it's still under building, in order to hide the expansion from the enemy, to hide the defenses so he/she could underestimate them etc. That sounds a bit lame, a mothership staying in the middle of nowhere, only a nub would fall into that... The other use I could see would be during attacks, to cloak your immortal, zealots, templars etc, but can the mothership move while maintaining this ability?

Regarding the two others abilities, beyond being able to disable a part of the enemy fleet or army, I hardly get what they plan to make with this super-unit...

The stasis field ability of the arbiter was a clear and useful ability in some cases, that "time bomb" thing is not to me, it just sounds like some special power like "we are an advanced specie, so we use abilities you can't even understand". Mmhwell kbye.

/signed

The only improvement I would see is that that mothership is some kind of super AA air unit, but is it still since the last time I checked?

 

I just reread this. How is the new timebomb useful if your own air units can't move? And how is it not utterly useless if you can't create it anywhere you like (like it was when first shown)? You know be it Blizzard with all their prestige and everything, I find myself questioning their imagination and competence increasingly more often. It seems that they don't even have basic concepts for units, they just toss around abilities to lark around in closed LAN parties.

 

Keep in mind the creative team who designed Starcraft 1 left the company years ago (except Metzen if I understood well), when Vivendi purchased them.

 

everything I wanted to say has been said =/
It seems more to me like last ditch attempts and more of an escape tactic as oppose to an offensive type strike. this could be useful if you're fleeing and have a mothership freeze them so you can get out of the way. But in the end, it's only a delay and though some good tactics can come of it it doesn't seem like an all powerful unit at all. They really let its potential go to waste.

 

It may be useful if u are dying with units and want the air units alive until the next wave of your ground units have air support, since they do not take dmg in the timebomb...

 

why would you ever want them alive? even if it's a time staller, it would be more useful if you could actually hurt them, or at least do something.

 

^
i think he means his own air units.
Say your coming in with reinforcements, and your ait units + mothership are getting hit and cant last any longer, use the timebomb so you wont get hit. This gives it a little more time for your reinforcements to come in.

 

Super units for Starcraft... why do people want that... this isnt C&C.

 

I agree with this hito dood.
The mothership shouldnt be unique.. that said, their abilities are ****ing awful D:

An arb with awesome attack would be completly overpowered.. maybe that's what blizzard though when they were making this piece of ****.
I'd say, scrap vortex and give planet cracker, and redo time bomb as it was on the first demo...

That mothership would be kinda rigged tho, so, let's see... they'r obviously changing the ms again, since no one liked this idea.


EDIT: WTH

I just voted strongly dislike it and saw that about 40% voted Excelent, it will be very useful D:

 

Everyone sure that Time Bomb has changed? Just sounds to me like it's shockingly worded. Seems to have the same effect, doesn't it?

 

it better