Reapers

^that gives me an idea. when phase prisms are deployed, are they still airborn or are they landed? because if they are still airborn, they would prevent zerglings from trying to eliminate cannons just by taking down the pylon.

 

I think they are still airborne. I don't know why they would be considered land. Also, the attacks against it from ground attacking units would look rather dumb.

 

We survived through intelligence. Its a simple as that, and besides. Its not like the bears and cats held meetings on how they wanted to be the dominant race. They just kinda, sat there while we took over.

anyways, back on topic...

reapers seem to do very little damage, and be relitivley inefective in the current state of the game. watch them try to go up against the soul hunters, they appear to just get owned outright while the marines take out a few. maybee they are cheap fast damage eaters? Again, same thing in the terran vs protoss battle at the end of the gameplay trailer. The reapers just jump down the cliff and get destroyed instantly.

 

Yeah, its so fun watching them explode and fly off. I might just have a bunch in reserve for when i need a quick laugh.

 

Good observation about the phase prism. Reavers and shuttles are not a good comparison. Reavers can't attack air, that is true, but they make up for it with a decent amount of hp/shields and very high damage. Reapers have neither of those. If you drop a reaver into a mineral patch and he gets two scarabs out then it would be worth it. Those scarabs would take 6-8 workers before the reaver is killed, and you generally drop more than one reaver. Since reapers deal so little damage per unit and have so little health it would be a waste of time to try and raid someone's base who has flying units around.

If reapers don't have anti-air then base raiding with them would be like trying to a drop with zerglings. It's also the reason people don't drop just tanks but tanks/goliaths or tanks/marines.

 

People don't even have air early game. And you only have like 2-4 reavers have if you want them to survive you have to pull them out with your shuttles pretty quick because they are slow. Plus if air IS on them, the shuttles are probably goners too if you wait to long. So, you can get off two shots at 125 damage each which is 250 damage which would be either 500 or 1000 damage depending on if you have 2 or 4 reavers. On the other hand you would have lots of reapers possibly 12-18. If each does 8 damage then its 96-144 damage in each volley. And they fire relatively fast so they could probably get off about 8 volleys in the time it takes a reaver to do two. Thats between 768-1152 damage. Now, that is definitely sufficient enough damage to kill all the workers.

 

but there is a flaw to that. reavers can only be 2 in a shuttle, so it takes about 1.5 seconds or so to unload. if you put8 reapers in a dropship, thats proabably about 6 seconds to unload, so some of them would only get a shot off before you need to run.

 

Why would you put reapers in a dropship? THEY JUMP OVER CLIFFS

 

oh i was thinking you were talking about it in the same terms as the reaver drop, just a reaper drop
well when they dont have to unload, i suppose they would be very effective.

 

exactly. jumping reaper raids. i think it would be pretty effective in and of itself and that is why i believe they do not attack air.

 

people are gonna learn to put defences by their workers (which they should do anyways), but if you have enough reapers you could probably just run past them and attack the workers, youd just have a few more losses.

 

put a bunker on one side of the command center and another one behind the minerals. Small price to pay for the protection of your workers. Or for protoss, same thing except with photon cannons. plus with phase cannons you can move them around as needed.

 

Definitely. All this just means new strategies and adaptions, this is one of the big reasons i'm looking forward to SC2...i won't have ppl with 10 years of experience in the game.

Or for Terran just put a siege tank or two there as well

 

yeah im saying that they do that and you just run past them to the workers. wreak their economy at the cost of a few reapers.

 

I was saying you have the defenses on either side of the workers so there is no running past them because running past one would bring you closer to the other and vice versa

 

I could not agree more with you. I think it would be imbalanced if the Reaper could get some (medium range) shots into a Zealot before it switched to a firebat "alternative"

Well said LimaBean, well said!

It maybe possible but what wrong is there in speculating right?

Reavers were not meant to be base raiders, they were more oriented towards long range bombardment and anti-defensive structure roles. People just found that they tended to be very useful against groups of workers and buildings.

The Reaper raid was scripted, probably had some AI Script that told them that the nexus was more important to take out. But who knows... :-X

But they cannot jump over huge gorges of lava can they?! Also, a group of Reapers are shown in the Protoss Unit Trailer being dropped from Dropships.

 

really? yeah, because there is negative space between the two bases

 

So? Those things are just to show off units, not to show excellent tactics. Besides, if a base is on a one level cliff then reapers can get to it easy, if not then don't use reapers.

 

Id like to see if they can jump over ground units and effectively flank a group of zealots or whatever. Flamethrowers ftw.

 

I think they'll be able to switch between pistols and flamethrowers. An upgrade that gives you a new attack while eliminating the one you had sounds stupid when there's such a big difference between those two types of attacks. Besides, judging from what we've seen, Blizzard really wants to make a dynamic game and switching between weapons would be one such thing, IMO.

Btw, where did you find out that they'll be able to use flamethrowers?