Protoss Unit Roster: A Review (with suggestions)

Well.... as to BirdofPrey and I being the same person... I don't think so, even though we often think alike

By referring to my "opinion" about the Mothership, I meant things other than the way it looks and its overall feel. I meant its abilities, its possible balancing options, etc.

That would be what I meant

Also, I'm not really all that in favor of this Haunt idea simply because I think it borrows too much from the new Terran mechanic. The Protoss need something different. But it is an interesting idea. Of course, it COULD be doable if they used it in all three races.

But again, I don't know about a "fixed" unit that is undetectable. Maybe a unit that is ethereal in form, like a dark templar type of observer thing going on. Maybe it can't be automatically targeted by units? Needs the player to actually click on it? I don't really now. But it does add a nice mechanic.

 

From his description, it sounds like like replacements to me otherwise he wouldn't have mentioned them. However, if the Haunt is like the sensor dome then it would not be a unique terran ability which kind of defeats the point of giving the Terran the sensor dome in the first place.

 

My 2 cents on the haunt idea would be to make the current observer dark templar in color shecme and intsead of giving it its old sight range upgrade give it a "cloak" thats makes it undetectable even to detectors. (for a limited time of course like the ghost cloak)

 

That's why I said I was semi against the idea. I don't like the idea of stealing the Terran mechanic.

But if you think about it a similar mechanic between the three races wouldn't be all that bad so long as they achieve it in different ways.

It's just like all three races having detection. Sure, they all have it, but they all achieve it in different ways which preserves the identity of each of the races.

@ LordKerwyn , that's actually not so bad an idea.

I actually REALLY like that. The undetectable detector.

 

Hey a midground between the observer and haunt would be for an upgrade to the observer that allows it to detect units ouside its visual range by a few grid units say half of that of its sight range. it will be affected by the range boost as well.

 

I haven't played SC in a while but last I play, even a cloak ghost can be detected by detectors otherwise Nuke will always go off.

But back to the undetectable detector, how are you going to implement it? Give it energy and let it "cloak under cloak" for a limited time and when the energy runs out it is regularly cloak? I always feel that anything "uncounterable" like I said earlier is kinda not Starcraft, but this might work if it only last only a short time in my opinion.

@joneagle you posted the other post while I was typing.

 

I have a though. An upgrade to the observer that changes how it sees units. Call it Telescopic mode. The probe rearranges its detectors to improve range but the side effect is it is no longer able to navigate and thus is stuck in place. Also it has sensory holes, very short range vision on the sides and none directly behind it. The front 10-15 degrees however will have a phenomenal sight range greater than that of any other unit in the game thus enabling it to spy on an enemy well outside its defenses. The swath will be relatively small so you will have to actively redirect it to scan the base but it will be easy as the move order is now the redirect order which will turn the unit to look at whatever you pointed it at.

 

Well don't forget the unit has no attack capability and no other abilities. So it really won't have any effect. And this ability would probably only be TRULY useful for slipping past base defenses to get inside and take a look around.

That or giving the "first detection" advantage to the Protoss in that they can see your units first and preserve their detection longer.

Of course, this may be going a bit too far as the Observer is already the most subtle detection unit in the game. It would be an interesting mechanic PvP though as Observers would constantly be playing the "spy game."

 

But seeing what your opponent is doing or building is a HUGE advantage. You can build counter immediately. You will basically own them! I think that's too great of an advantage even though Protoss is my favorite race and I want blizzard to give them cool units and abilities.

 

Oh also as a counter to my observer suggestion all the detectors would have something like a radar detect so if the observer scanning beam passes over an enemy detector it becomes visible as long as it is looking at the detector.  So you are scanning and the beam passes over a Turret.  The turret's owner can see your observer for the second the beam passes over the turret. Possibly have a scan warning too

 

Now it's just too complicated.

Don't forget that the Observer is a tier 2 unit. Then you could make this "cloaked cloak" ability a research for Tier 3 when scouting isn't such a huge advantage.

 

What is too complicated his or my suggestion?

 

Having a scanning ability that sets off an "alarm"?

Having sight only in one specific direction?

I mean... this is limiting its abilities more than enhancing them. While I think the Observer certainly needs a change... I don't know if this is quite the direction to go.

It's already cloaked so it's arguably the best detector in the game. Of course, each race's detector has its advantages...

Overlord can transport and costs no food. It's also a base unit.

The Terran Nomad is a caster. Two for one

The Observer cloaks.

 

The alarm was the answer to his concern about you being able to see everything but myself I wouldn't put that part in I would just make the upgrade late enough you probably already know the enemy's build order

 

I see that you made another great post after the Terran Unit Roster one. However, this time I find myself disagreeing with a lot more of your ideas. That's still not to say that your opening post wasn't a great one.

As many other people have pointed out, I find the Haunt to be an imbalanced idea. Whenever you seek to improve a unit's capabilities, I think you should first consider how to give the unit weaknesses to compensate and making it impossible to counter.

If you want some more flavor for the observer, I have two idea suggestions. One is to give it a scan mode, just like how the phase prism has a pylon mode, where it will shift out of cloak and become visible, but it will scan units even under fog of war within a greatly increased range. Any observer you put into scan mode will be completely immobile, and will only scan and no longer detect cloaked units, but you can still change back to observer mode at any time to get back detection, cloaking, and mobility.

The second idea is to give the observer an active ability, in the form of a scouting projectile, called emm... the eye pod(ok, not very funny). The observer can fire off a missile that is visible even to the enemy in a straight line, basically you aim in a direction and the missile shoot off in a line. The scout missile should have a very long range, around the length of a whole screen or so, but have a small sight radius. It should also travel pretty fast, so you gotta pay attention at what you see. The scout missile ability can not be directly countered, as it can not be directly targeted or destroyed. But the missile disappears on its own after reaching max range, and the trade off is also that it gives a clue to the enemy where your observer is based on the trajectory. These are just some ideas. I personally care less about aesthetics, so I don't really care if the observer is gold or blue, neither effects gameplay.

Another one that I must disagree with is the Osprey. I think the phoenix is exactly what the Protoss needs, and even fits your own discription of what the Protoss should have. The only thing that's getting in the way I think, is the lore. But the overload ability I think is perfect for gameplay. It allows Protoss players to take down outnumbering enemy air units, and it also requires some skill to use with greatest efficiency.

If you really want some ideas on changing it, perhaps giving it an ability where each phoenix can disable a single enemy air unit for a certain duration, kind of like lockdown but for all air and air only. Or scrap overload altogether and just make the phoenix attack two or three air targets simultaneously. But I still think the current phoenix is the best, gameplay wise.

I also would like the carrier or tempest to be in the game. But I wish they would change it back to be similar to how the original tempest was. It can keep the carrier namesake(which is more popular) and the gold color(again, more popular), but I think they should change the carrier to make it more unique and useful. As I've already suggested elsewhere a while back, I would like to see them make the carrier more accessible, whether by lowering the cost, tech, food supply, or a combination of the three. But at the same time, I would like it the have a ground attack ONLY and also have the anti-ground hardened shield back. This way I think, carriers would actually be more useful and also be used more in multiplayer.

Now the Mothership, I definitely disagree. I want the MS to go back to being the 1-per-player hard-capped super unit. Make it like how it was in the original showing, but give it some tweaks as needed for balance. I've already posted way too much about the MS in other threads, so I won't go into it here.

Now I have some ideas of my own. I would like the DT to have a phasing ability. The DT focuses its immense psionic abilities to momentarily allow itself to pass through other objects. Give it whatever explanation as required, don't really care, but the ideas is the DT can activate this ability to phase through other units, basically making it have no collision/clipping for a very short period of time. If you've played War3, at one point Undead ghouls had a glitch that allowed them to pass through other units by clicking on trees(to harvest). It was referred to as forestwalk, and ghosting(my preferred term) by some, and this DT ability is just like that.

The DT has this stealth assassin image, and in practice is also better for selective usage than engaging the enemy in frontal assaults. With this ability, the DT can pass through units to hit the rear ranks of the enemy to take out certain key units. I think this would offer additional tactical potential for the DT while also making it even more unique. I've always thought that it was kinda cheesy for players to block off DTs heading to their bases on maps with narrow paths by looking at the "blur" from the cloaking. If a unit is cloaked and invisible enough for you to be unable to retaliate when it's swinging its sword at your in your face, I don't see how they can or should be intentionally blocked off when they're sneaking around.

The phasing ability should be something that can't be used by DTs very often at all. It should either have a very long cooldown if it's a free ability like blink, or have a huge energy cost. Which one it should be depends on if the DT(and specifically this ability) should be effected by spells like EMP and feedback.

Another idea isn't even really a well defined solid idea, it's a more of a suggestion to the mechanic of the twilight archon. I think it might be interesting if the TA had two abilities(not saying it can't have others besides these two) where one costs energy and the other costs shield. The specifics to the shield costing ability doesn't really matter for this mechanic, as long as there is a way for the Protoss player to intentionally deplete the TA's shield themselves. The second ability is more important, it would be an energy costing offensive spell where it would get increasingly more powerful the less shield the TA has. Basically, weak at full shield and hit max potential at zero shield.

I guess NateSMZ's original "Psionic Disjunction" idea could fit in here, although it would actually be the exact opposite. But like I said, the exact specifics of the abilities are unimportant, I'm merely suggesting a mechanic. The idea is that basically Protoss players would be left with the choice of whether to try to preserve the TA to maximize the use of its powerful combat abilities, or sacrifice longevity of the TA and take advantage of a full-power offensive spell. I don't think the energy costing spell should be anywhere close to nuke's level of power, but it should be AoE. I think this would make an interesting mechanic for Protoss players, and I usually don't care much about lore, I think it also fits the Protoss well. The mighty archon, a proud Protoss warrior, at the height of its anger and the brink of its own destruction, unleashes its fury with full force as it willingly risk sacrificing itself to musters the last of its powers in one final attempt to annihilate its foes for the good of the greater Protoss race. Or some crap like that...

I originally wanted to throw all my issues, concerns, and key ideas into a single large post and put it up in the Hyperion, but I guess this thread is as good a place as any other. One more idea, Mothership (replacement?)spell, the Shockwave. Long range spell fired in the form of a fast projectile, upon reaching the targeted location, explodes and lets rip a powerful shockwave. Visually, you can think of it as like the EMP shockwave, missile, boom, rippling effect, the whole thing. But the usage is hugely different.

The actual effect of the Shockwave spell, is that it violently pushes all enemy units within range outward from the center of the exposion. Basically it does no damage, but shifts the location of enemy units in the direction opposite of where the rocket hit. The range of this spell should be between 8 and 12, and the AoE should be pretty large, close to half a screen in every direction.

I know it's hard to get a grasp of what the hell this spell would be used for, so let me explain in more detail. If you are faced with a swarm of Zerg and your Protoss army consist mostly of ranged units, you fire off the spell and throws all the Zerg units back about half a screen(or less, shouldn't be more). Another example, you are faced with a well organized Terran army with close to perfect unit positioning and formation. You fire off the spell dead in the middle of the Terran army throwing the guys in the back further away from you for about half a screen, at the same time pulling the guys at the front closer to you. Now the Terran army is divided into two, with almost a screen's distance between them. Of course the Terran player can quickly regroup and pull the guys in the front back and the guys in the back forward, but it still would create a window of mementary tactical advantage for the Protoss.

You can also use it to scatter enemy units guarding a choke to buy your army a window of timing, I think the possibilities are limitless. However, the most important thing is that this spell doesn't deal any damage and doesn't win you any battles directly, it merely offer you a chance at having a tactical advantage, you would still have to have some skills to be able to take advantage of it. But it's still a pretty big tactical advantage in the right hands and should be a spammable or abusable spell, so it's why I suggest it as a "super unit" MS ability. I think a problem with the super MS, is that the spells directly deal massive damage when the MS already had good offensive capabilites. Instead of doing more damage, which the rest of you units can already do, they should seek ways of how the MS can offer tactical advantages for the rest of your troops. As much as I want the MS as a super unit, and as good as I think it should be, I don't think it should even remotely be close to possible to function on its own AT ALL.

 

wow, lemme try to catch up, ha

"it cannot be dectected is uncounterable because it can't be kill at that moment"

It could still be shot down by an AOE attack. Secondly, each race has things the others can't do. Almost every Zerg unit can Burrow and be invisible... if we only heard about that instead of seeing it in gameplay, we'd prolly think that was overpowered too. With the Dark Templar tech, I think this unit makes sense. You'd know stuff was there, but you wouldn't know what.

If you are fighting a battle against cloak units, how are you able to get a detector there besides cannons

The unit I'm suggesting wouldn't be the only detector for the Protoss. I'd say that their Star Relic/Nomad/Mothership/whatever their support air unit ends up being, should be a detector also. The unit I'm suggesting is primarily focused on invisibility, and detection second.

As to the Void Drifter, the losing life points sound so much like an irradiate of a science vessel while the ramming ability with the those warp blades are too zergy. In fact this is how an ultralisk attack.

Not life points, energy points. And that is also how Zealots and Dark Templar attack.

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It's just like all three races having detection. Sure, they all have it, but they all achieve it in different ways which preserves the identity of each of the races.

My thoughts too. The idea behind the scanning without sight was that this unit is comprised of Void energies, since it would be impossible for others to find it, that means that it cannot do anything measurable. So I wanted to demonstrate that in that it doesn't transfer video images, just knowledge of units in proximity to it. ie: modern day active radar which can be detected and passive radar which can't... but of course passive radar tells you a lot less.

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Whenever you seek to improve a unit's capabilities, I think you should first consider how to give the unit weaknesses to compensate

Inability to move and a countdown timer aren't sufficient weaknesses?

I do however like the scouting missile idea too.

And everyone's comments on the Phoenix are right on point. The name fits... Osprey certainly doesn't. The model looks good, and my Gravity Pulse Chain idea isn't very polished. BUT, I still stand by the overload mechanism being a poor choice for Protoss units. Some other way to counter swarms of enemies is needed. I think you might be right that perhaps the Phoenix just needs to attack multiple units naturally. I'm still thinking about this one though.

Dark Templar phasing? hmm... sounds interesting... their background supports the idea...

I REALLY like that shield vs. energy concept. Maybe so the ability doesn't overlap the utility of nukes, it should be a focused attack. ie: still an area attack, but have it be a beam of destruction instead of a circle... so instead of trying to find a clump of units like a nuke player does, you'd try to find a column of units to unleash mayhem on

Shockwave sounds interesting too... And if the Mothership is in the game, I'd like to see it be powerful defensively and with many support/tactical abilities... I don't want to see it as an engine of ultimate doom however... that's not what mothers are after all.

 

Yeah that's very true in my case and I do also wish blizzard give them awsome defence's and abilitie's!

 

I don't think so.  The countdown is merely providing a window of possibility to counter it, after which it becomes invulnerable for good.  I see it as more of a technical weakness "for the record" instead of a realistic means of counter.  If an opponent never saw a Haunt teleporting into place, they would have no way of countering it.  Randomly spamming AoE spells isn't a counter.

The immobility I also fail to see as a real weakness.  If you look at the Terran's radar dome, it's a stationary structure.  The Haunt can be strategically located anywhere on the map, if it becomes immobile afterwards, it really isn't a drawback.  Furthermore, the radar dome allows enemy players to also be aware of the effective range of the sensor, the Haunt even sidesteps this tradeoff.

Any weakness should be something that can be taken advantage of all the time.  Anything that can't be countered at any given time by having the right tools or method, is imba.  "Catch me now or you never will," is not a real weakness.

 

wow Rmey, some of your ideas are great! owerup:

the dark templar phasing ability is great, however i don't think it should cost too much time or energy, unlike the haunt, the dt is detectable after all.

about the haunt, i like the idea, but the concerns about it being OP are justified, so i've come up with a compromise:

- the haunt is totally invisible without detectors, (not even showing blurs like normal cloaked units)
- when a detectors is in range, the haunt could be seen as a blur, (like how you see cloaked units without detectors) however, seeing it in this form still wouldn't enable you to attack it, just as you wouldn't be able to attack normal blurs. the only way to kill it would be with an aoe attack, any aoe attack would kill it in one shot.

this way the haunt is still pretty much invulnerable you can't just cast a aoe spell whenever you want, but it does provide a way to kill it. also knowing the fact there is a haunt would be a useful counter against it - you could even mislead your opponent and give him false information about your plans.

the shockwave is an awesome idea, i totally agree the mothership shouldn't have too many offensive abilities, ok the planet cracker is fine but things like timebomb and the shockwave are what the mothership should be mainly about - manipulating the battlfield in favor of your troops, twisting the tide of the battle in a support role, not an offensive role. it just doesn't make sense for the mothership to charge single handedly into battle and kill everything, the mothership should have awe-inspiring abilities, but there should be an army to take advantage of those feats achieved by the mothership. people should think the mothership as a glorified arbiter, with similar roles. the arbiter has very powerful abilities, but it's attack is next to useless. you would't charge a few arbiters into battle with no troops at home and hope it's puny gun and some stasis or recalling no troops would win you the battle. you just need to "scale up" the arbiter to get the mothership - even better abilities and an useful, but not overwhelming, attack.

EDIT: i'm for the mothership to be an unique unit btw.

 

Thanks Breaker, your new avatar is great too.

I think the DT's phasing ability shouldn't be something that you can use too often, certainly nowhere near as often as blink. Although not anything like a once-per-DT ability, I think it should be used only once in a good while, as to promote the benefit of strategic use. If it's made to be usable too often, it's as if the DT can pass through units by built-in design as opposed to an ability that's used strategically.

You're suggestion for the Haunt would certainly make it less imba than the original idea, but I think even then, it would still be too good to be honest. Recon is HUGE, it's one of the most important aspects of successful multiplayer, if not THE most important. The Haunt offers lots of it, yet it doesn't have too many trade-offs. It shares all of the radar dome's benefits yet with none of the weaknesses but instead with additional strengths, even after your idea. I think it's still too much trouble to take out the Haunt considering what it does. Even with the detect blur property, you're banking on the chance that you might notice a small spot of immobile blur after you've covered the whole map with detection.